Stuffed Shells

Growing up I had a friend who Mom was straight out of an Italy cookbook. I mean everything she made was awesome and 100% Italian. My all time favorite dish was her stuffed shells.

Stuffed shells can really be anything you want it to be. It can have meat, sauce, cheese or all three. However for me it has to be cheese. There is a science to this though. The cheese has to have marcapone in it. This crazy cheese is the secret to amazing shells.

My friend incidentally thought this was so rare he thought he would open his own restaurant one day and sell a butt-load of shells and be rich and famous. Instead he got into roofing over at constructoMAX.com. He is rich but not quite so famous.

Anyway this is what his Mom did. She would buy freshly made shells from the local Italian bakery. I know, if she was Italian then she should be making her own pasta right? Not when your cousin runs the bakery and gets you the pasta cheap. Plus he reasoning was the less time she is making pasta the more time she has to make the sauce and the filling.

She would set the pasta in the fridge while her sauce and cheese was cooking. Her sauce was the usual tomatoes and paste. She would let this simmer all day while adding spices throughout. The exact spices she used was never revealed. We were never allowed to hang out in the kitchen when she was cooking so I never even got a casual glance of what she put in there. Some Italians are nuts about their recipes.

The cheese would be mixed about an hour before stuffing into shells. She would add the mozzarella, parmesan and marcapone cheese. The blended together slowly with constant stirring to maintain consistency.

She would take out the shells while cold and stuff them. Her little trick was to take the cheese and put them in a bakers syringe and use that to inject each shell with the exact same amount of cheese. It was novel and less messy as well.

Then they were covered in sauce and baked. I tell you I have not a better stuffed shell since my childhood. It is sad this kind of stuff dies with the creators but I guess it leaves a certain amount of respect for the craft and uniqueness of it all.